Performance Max is not a strategy.
How to use Google's black-box campaign type without giving up your unit economics.
Performance Max sells operators on a tempting promise: hand us your assets and your conversion data, and we will find the buyer for you. The pitch works because it is, in narrow circumstances, true. The trouble is that those narrow circumstances are not the ones most companies are operating in.
We have spent the past year auditing PMax accounts at scale. Three patterns repeat. First, branded search cannibalization. Without explicit exclusions, PMax will spend significant budget bidding on terms you would have won organically. Second, lead-form optimization at the expense of qualified pipeline; the algorithm gets very good at producing the cheap conversion you measured, even when it is the wrong conversion. Third, asset-group bleed, where a single under-performing creative drags down the auction signals for the entire campaign.
The fix is not to abandon PMax. The fix is to treat it as one weapon in a portfolio, fed by deliberate, revenue-grounded signals. That means importing closed-won data via offline conversions, segmenting asset groups by deal size, and pairing PMax with a structured branded-search campaign that earns the credit it deserves. Done well, PMax can absolutely earn a place in a B2B mix. Done lazily, it is a quiet way to spend money on demand you already had.